Book Image

Demystifying Ansible Automation Platform

By : Sean Sullivan
Book Image

Demystifying Ansible Automation Platform

By: Sean Sullivan

Overview of this book

While you can use any automation software to simplify task automation, scaling automation to suit your growing business needs becomes difficult using only a command-line tool. Ansible Automation Platform standardizes how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, and this comprehensive guide shows you how you can simplify and scale its management. The book starts by taking you through the ways to get Ansible Automation Platform installed, their pros and cons, and the initial configuration. You’ll learn about each object in the platform, how it interacts with other objects, as well as best practices for defining and managing objects to save time. You’ll see how to maintain the created pieces with infrastructure as code. As you advance, you’ll monitor workflows with CI/CD playbooks and understand how Ansible Automation Platform integrates with many other services such as GitLab and GitHub. By the end of this book, you’ll have worked through real-world examples to make the most of the platform while learning how to manipulate, manage, and deploy any playbook to Ansible Automation Platform.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Ansible Automation Platform Up and Running
6
Part 2: Configuring AAP
13
Part 3: Extending Ansible Tower

Using built-in Automation controller inventory plugins

There are several plugins built directly into the controller—these are mainly for connecting to cloud services. A list of supported services that can gather information about hosts, followed by their API and module aliases, is provided here:

  • AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)—ec2
  • Google Compute Engine (GCE)—gce
  • Microsoft Azure Resource Manager (ARM)—azure_rm
  • VMware vCenter—vmware
  • Red Hat Satellite 6—satellite6
  • Red Hat Insights—insights
  • OpenStack—openstack
  • Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)—rhv
  • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform—controller
  • Project—scm will be covered in the following Using other popular inventory plugins section

Most of these inventory sources share a common form. Previously, the Using inventory sources section went into detail of how to add these as inventory sources to the Automation controller...